


goldfinch

by soaps



Category: Free!
Genre: F/M, Mentions of Breathplay, Possibly Unrequited Love, set several years after es
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 07:45:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8481325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soaps/pseuds/soaps
Summary: It is strange to think that she lusts for him, easy to think the conclusion is a trick for how poor Sousuke is at quantifying such perceptions - his thoughts an easily understood bundle of straight lines but feelings and senses he has no words for shudder about him and slip by like wind in a net.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i dont think there is anything too graphic in here but there is some description of sex. everything is 100% consensual.

Sousuke is watching her again. She is rinsing her shirt in the sink. She hadn't taken it off and he'd stained it. Knocking around in the bathroom Gou hangs the shirt over the towel rack. Standing over him she blinks down.

“I have class in an hour,” She says. She is finally naked.

Sousuke touches her breast, the glory of her body - transfigured, a halo of goldenrod on the desk behind her and the sunlight seeping in. A tender ache in him because of how he wants her. She straddles his middle, sex to navel, eye to blinking eye. The heat is stifling, welcoming, spring is ending and the pavement is warming up and it is inevitable that something else will soon be entertaining her. He wouldn't know if he hadn't thought it himself, her body soft and giving where she herself is not. Sousuke brushes hair over her thin shoulder. His touch is gentle as though Gou could be a glimmer in the light that he casts a shadow over - a yellow spot over water that disappears as you come upon it. She is not wearing makeup yet and so her eyelashes fade to gold transparency at their tips, her kissed lips unevenly colored and darker near their seam as though she had spent the morning biting at fruit and not his straining heart.

Gou turns from him. Lined from the top of her breast, collar to throat to tipped chin, heaves a breath. “You should be going,” she says, it is probably not that she is sorry for it so much that she did not want to have to come out and say it. She is not the kind of person to change her mind. What she wants from these mornings and what Sousuke wants are two different things.

Once outside it is as though the morning has passed. There is no potential in sunlight outside of that bedroom. The day is early and still it feels done.

It is not even the sex for Sousuke, as if Gou could not be fucked by him - every motion of his hand is directed by her, and in time each beat of his pulse brought by the soft line of hair over her forehead and the patter of her voice against him as rain on a tin roof dripping over. He is invited by Gou, his eyes blinking open as the lines between them haze and melt, particles of gold floating in their sunlight, and Sousuke is completely enslaved by the thought of her.

Her hand over his hand, leading without dare and trusting as one trusts their own hand around their neck. He presses into her windpipe as he fucks her. Vinous eyes glassy and leaking over her lashes so that mascara tracks her face.

In his chest there is an arrangement as is done with flowers but instead is made with all of the instances calling for self reflection and their uncomfortable complexities Sousuke has stowed away. Her throat is so thin in his hands, like a swan’s, and his two-handed grip overlaps by two knuckles, and Gou is writhing on his cock, torn between the need to breathe and the call to submit. There is a spray of wildflowers on her desk today. Sousuke had brought them. He is squeezing color into her face and he cannot help but relish such perversion, and maybe he enjoys her curious struggle because he resents Gou's refusal to give - to give him what? What hasn’t she given? Her body spread thin and taught, whole but looking so ripped open, where does Sousuke fit when she takes up all of the light? He wants her to scoot over. He wants to eclipse her, too. The thoughts are fantastical.

When Gou cries and arches from the bed and her rocking hips stutter her entire body strains against him. He releases her throat and she gasps for air wetly, all of her heaving and tensing doing everything for Sousuke and he lingers at the precipice until relief finally finds him like a ball bat to the guts.

She watches him, breast heaving. Gou throws back her head. She had taken her hair down this time as Sousuke had asked her to. It is tangled a bit and lays over the bedding in ropes. She laughs once - a little maniacally. Sousuke has never had such chemistry with anyone else. Her throat is red. He crawls into bed and takes a moment to regain himself, feeling completely spent and raw all over. He feels he himself asphyxiated. Her touch to him is that of stinging nettle, tender in her arms he wraps around his middle. It is jarring to have a ravenous hunger suddenly sated and he will deny if she asks about it. Head on his shoulder, Gou’s hand over his breast. Light strikes over her legs below the knee and shines them white and unreal but he is drawn to her face as she won't look at him. He wonders what she thinks of him and if the pensive set of her brow is due to those thoughts.  
He jostles her lightly.

“You are very strong,” she says plainly. Thrilled by it she laughs again, her breath finally caught.

He puts his nose in her hair.

“What did you think of that?” she pets his stomach. It is strange to think that she lusts for him, easy to think the conclusion is a trick for how poor Sousuke is at quantifying such perceptions - his thoughts an easily understood bundle of straight lines but feelings and senses he has no words for shudder about him and slip by like wind in a net.

Touching her hair, he thinks of braiding it. She wouldn’t let him. He asked to brush it once and she refused. That had stung, it was months ago and he still returns to the thought when he touches it. “You make me mean,” he decides, though he comes to it without malice. Vindication, maybe, but not hate.

Still Gou removes herself from him. Dark eyes are brimming with disdain, maybe she has chosen the wrong man. “I make you nothing,” she says.

She is offended somehow, Sousuke realizes. She takes off her mascara with a cotton pad in the bathroom. She is about to take a shower. She won't be black-eyed, she has said, from that water over her face.

Rin has come back around and he is staying with his mother. Rin is the first person that Sousuke had ever loved aloud and they will age in intersecting compass sweeps - returning and leaving but always fixed at one end. “We might as well be brothers,” Rin says one evening when they are sitting together on the back porch watching the amber edges of the grass at the end of the property catch light. Sousuke tips back his head and closes his eyes to it. Sousuke had never kept anything from him before.

When Sousuke pulls into the drive Rin and Gou are waiting. Gou is wearing a yellow dress. Rin takes the back seat and Gou waves Sousuke from the driver's. Her hair is down again, completely lax, free of even the small braid she sometimes put in near her face.

“Thanks for coming,” she says, and her face is open and fresh in a way that makes Sousuke wish he could kiss her.

“Why does Gou get to drive?” Rin harangues. 

“She knows where she's going.”

Gou smiles at that and shifts into reverse. She's probably wearing sandals, toenails still painted pink. It isn't that Sousuke does not know where he is trying to go but that he always gets turned around trying to get there and Gou confided in him once that one of her pleasures is driving other people's cars. It is because in turning the wheel there is no muscle memory that says when to stop so there is anticipation for every turn. Gou loves suspense, loves most to direct and help and to be entertained, and she must be confident in herself - knowing at least her limits and capabilities far better than even Sousuke knows his own.

The wedding is quick and Sousuke drinks at the reception since Gou is driving. Twice he catches her looking at him, and the third time most of her hair is pulled in front of her and made to look haphazard for how it lays over both her shoulders and breasts. Thoughts leave him and buzz about like bees in their yellow jackets, as Sousuke removes his own for Gou to wear when they walk around outside in the near-dark, specks of spring flowers in their beds glowing in the last moments of light like residue from a camera flash. “Rin is going home with someone else,” Gou says. “You and I can leave unnoticed whenever we want.”

“Are you ashamed of me, then?”

He may have meant it as a joke but still Gou puckers her mouth and considers his question as she deeply considers all questions directed to her. She does not appear to be angry with him anymore. She is more gentle with him than she has been in a long time. Her steadfastness on all things comes from deliberation, she pays equal respect to the serious and inane. “No,” she says finally. “Not at all. I suppose I thought you'd stay the night.”

Sousuke blinks down at her. His stomach is restless.

She looks back at him. “Your car,” Gou says simply. She won't let him drive and she certainly will not walk home, and to drop him off and take his car back to her apartment and hope to get it back to him tomorrow is too much hassle. He will have to drive himself home when he can. “I even have a spare toothbrush.”

She goes through the apartment and turns all of the lights on. Sousuke wonders if he drank more than he realized. Gou decides they will sit on the couch and watch a movie and she sits right against him so that when she breathes Sousuke feels it. Gou pours a glass of wine for herself and a glass for Sousuke. All he can think of is her skin and how it holds her together in one piece that he can hold and how grateful he is. Without her flesh he would be fighting gales without a foot on the earth, all of his weapons in straight lines would be tied in knots and arrows pointing in every direction. 

Gou lifts the remote and turns off the television mid-scene so that she may have Sousuke's full attention when she kisses him, and for some reason Sousuke finds that very charming. After a few moments of that he fights off her hands then holds them in one large fist as he circles in front of her. He folds back the skirt of her dress and settles between her legs and reaches from under her thighs to take two firm handfuls of her ass to bring her forward. Sousuke ducks under the yellow fabric and her breath comes in short puffs. She shifts and squirms against him, and soon she tires of the fabric keeping her hands from him and pulls up her dress to the ribs. Her fingers curl in his short hair. With renewed sight he can handle her breasts through clothing, a disorienting barrier to what is and isn’t - . 

In bed she straddles the small of his back, naked as he is naked, and rubs firm strokes into the muscles around his shoulders. When she leans too far forward her hair tickles his nape. Those small hands are not very strong but still Gou knows where to exude the most pressure on him and Sousuke unwinds under her touch.

She caresses him from hip to shoulder. “Has anyone ever told you that you have a very pretty back?” Deliberately she falls forward and bites him between the neck and shoulder, hard enough that he grunts and bruises. She kisses her sorry, nipples apparent against his skin. He feels feverish. “Hmm?”

“No.”

“No?” She deliberates over what she means to say. “I will have to start letting you know these things.” Sousuke releases a breath and she takes back up with her massage. Every inch of him is electrified, in each place they touch is a raging current. 

“Do you think they will stay married long?” Gou asks.

“I don't know.”

“I think in order to love someone you have to say it to yourself aloud, over and over - Even if a person does not understand it themselves, maybe pretending to have a firm grip... Certainly I cannot go without. I drift from even my own mother without this - the feeling of love will stay with me but without the words my head wobbles, not sewn down. Sometimes I fear lying. I do not want to be cruel. I do love. It is hard to grasp.”

Gou slips from him and lies near his prone body, her own naked form clearly visible in the thick yellow light of an old lamp she keeps at her bedside - one card that is in play and the other in waiting, queen and something else. “It seems a horrible burden to bear.” This is a great admission for her, “I might be a little afraid, here.” Sousuke has long understood that her voice carries weight to wrench his bones - their matutinal couplings drive him and under Gou he both frays and comes together, a morning glory twisting apart and curling to all at once. Here she is caught chiaroscuro, yellowed - emblazoned with gold. For all that has buzzed about him and for all of his stings Sousuke does not fear her as she does him. No - his fear is understandable, healthy even, and still he goes like a man across a tightrope.

“What do you say about me?” he asks her finally.

“To myself? Or to anyone?”

“What do you say?”

If in the dark of her night-riddled bedroom a shadow could be cast by birds in her window no silhouette would rest against her - no fluttering dark would touch her: long hair cast about like a halo and in one closed fist a sparrow, in the open palm a goldfinch blushing. Birds do not cry nocturnes, this is why the air is not right. Thumbnail moon a sliver, sunlight on the opposite end. They have been translated from one place to another and without boundary they could end up anywhere. That is what the song means. Gou invites him. He steps across too soon as always. Her warm hand laden with flight - it reaches out to touch his cheek. “You tell me what you want.”

Turning his dark face into the hand, Gou's heart, red wild berries - the snare. The ceaseless chirping. A pulse. She kisses him, stings his mouth. You make me happy, Sousuke wants to say. She kisses his throat and bites at his breath like she means to end it. Knowing, knowing, melting in old lamplight, wet particles of ocher cutting right into them and settling onto their skin like fallout. Like something unsaid - shed down from a bird who does not know how precious her feather is.


End file.
